Friday, April 4, 2008

Why Jaded not Posting?

I has no camera at the moment and I know that without pictures of stuff, my blog is pretty much boring to read. My aunt was taking a group picture of my cousins and family and she dropped it on the ground. The innards of the battery spilled onto the floor.... heh j/k, just the batteries. Anyway, I did buy a new camera (Canon SD1100), but hit a huge snag. Whilst shopping on the internet, Justyn tells me to go through preferredphoto.com since the price was significantly lower and included free shipping. I'm not a total n00b to shopping and buying from online stores, so I went for it. Unfortunately, preferredphoto.com turned out to be a very unreputable (is that a word?) vendor. They sent me an email a day after I purchased the camera online telling me that I had to call to confirm the order. That's new to me. I've never had to call to confirm any orders. The first time I called the 800 number and dialed in the extension, the thing put me on hold automatically where I waited for 10 minutes! After what I thought was someone picking up the phone, my call went straight to a voice mail box that was full. ZOMG.... I lost my patience at that point and decided to make the call the next day.

The next day (which is today), I called 3 other times and everytime I got someone on the line, they automatically transferred me to the extension where the mailbox was full. Noooooo... despite me telling the sales rep that I didn't want to be transferred they did it anyway. I was quickly losing my cool having to redial the number once more when my other line rang. It was another sales rep telling me that I had to call my credit card company to have them add a shipping address since my billing address was different? Again... WHAT? I've never had to do this before, so I explain that to the sales rep... quite rudely. Here's the conversation:

Me: I've never had to call my credit card company and have them add an address so someone could ship my order.
Sales Rep: Well, it's a new security measure.
Me: You know what? Just cancel my order.
Sales Rep: Why do you want to cancel your order?
Me: Because over the past two days, I've been trying to confirm my damn order and it's been very frustrating to do such a simple thing.
Sales Rep: Why do you have to be such a rude person?
Me: I'M RUDE?! You've gotta be kidding me. *explains situation again* Just cancel my order.
Sales Rep: I can cancel your order, but all you have to do is call your credit card company to add a shipping address. Are you so lazy that you can't do that?
Me: I'm not lazy, I've never dealt with a company as horrible as yours. I will never order from you again!
Sales Rep: OK... have a ni....
*Me hanging up*

Huge lesson learned, don't ever order from a company you're not sure of and make sure you do research to make sure they are reputable. In regards to the camera, I'll be buying it in-store through Office Depot. This type of experience makes me feel so vulnerable and stupid. Ugh... Oh and to add to that, I ended up googling the company's name and found out that a bunch of other people were scammed far worse than I did. For example, people were complaining that the company ended up shipping them their order and charging their credit cards for more than what the product was worth even though they cancelled their order. To prevent that sort of thing from happening to me, I called my bank to have them issue a stop payment to the company under a couple of their aliases. I'm really suprised that nobody has taken legal action against scammers like this. Yeeesh.

2 comments:

Wandering Chopsticks said...

Oh man, that's awful. Is the 1100 that much better than the 1000? I have the 1000 and it's going for $150 these days.

But yeah, I stay away from unknown retailers b/c you just never know. And customer service makes a big difference too. I can't believe the sales rep said you were rude.

JadedOne said...

Actually WC.. I'm gonna get a SD1000 since it's on sale at Office Depot. In fact, I'm going to buy it today :)

Also, glad to know people still read my blog without pretty pics!